Monday, 24 August 2015

Are you with us?

Ukip like to cast themselves as "the people's army". If that analogy
holds then they are cannon fodder. What we need in this coming
referendum is special forces carrying out special operations. We have
seen that numbers without co-ordination and strategy does not get
results. For all Ukip's resources and exposure it still failed to get
more than one MP - attributable to their own lacklustre campaign.

For a long time we have warned that the EU referendum campaign will
follow a similar path with well funded operations springing up from
nowhere, attracting much publicity, with plenty of casual support, but
in the end lack the expertise to put it to work.

Looking at The Know's Facebook page we see it has already attracted a large number of "likes", but if we look at the content we see them making all the classic mistakes,
making promises that Brexit is unlikely to achieve - and complaining
about bent bananas. If I was going to design a false flag operation, it
would look a lot like The Know.

They're essentially sucking up the kipper support and relabelling it -
and that's not going to win any new territory. Here follows a glorious
example of the sort of people they're attracting:

And then there's this little gemstone...

You don't have to dig deep to find it. This is what contemporary
euroscepticism looks like now. Obviously such people are no use to us in
building a progressive and outward looking case for Brexit, and the
best thing The Know could do is serve as a cesspit to keep that lot
distracted. We can't tell you just how depressed that makes us feel -
but we're not going to take it lying down.

It is our view that we can do more with less. The Know and Business for
Britain will waste a lot of money and energy rushing around well before
the referendum campaign kicks off, boring their audiences and making an
irrelevance of themselves. It is our view that the referendum will be
much later than anybody thus far anticipates, so the focus must now be
on building a reserve unit who can pick up where they tail off and reach
new audiences with new arguments.

We're sceptical about how useful big ticket websites
can be - and these eurosceptic start-ups tend to just feed from the
existing pond, each cannibalising each-others support. There is no value
in this. Instead what we need is a core of bloggers each with a
respectable Twitter following. Individuals, not organisations will turn
the tide. By our reckoning we're going to need thirty such people, who
we are happy to train and lend support to. Thinkers who influence other
thinkers are worth ten thousand kippers.

We are old hands at social media and blogging and can advise anyone who
wants to join such a team. This team will need to crosslink and retweet
each-other - putting egos and minor differences aside. They don't
necessarily need to work together, but co-operation helps growth. We
need to start early on this because on the web, content is king, and for
search engine optimisation, older blogs with more content leave a
larger web footprint. The mission being to put clear blue water between
us and the kipper grunters, to show that there is a liberal and
progressive wing of euroscepticism that has larger concerns and a
broader visions.

What we definitely don't want are immigration obsessives, climate change
bores or people who will rant about bent bananas. We are looking for
euro-sceptics. And by that we mean actual sceptics who express genuine
scepticism over everything they see and hear - especially those who,
like us, are sceptical of the nonsense the europhobes are presently
belching out on an industrial scale.

If you have a forensic eye for detail and a shrewd eye we need to hear
from you. This is going to require a lot of commitment, and running a
blog is no small undertaking - but that's the challenge. We need an
elite squad of mature, dedicated people who can take a brief, work to a
strategy and think for themselves. If you think you are up to the job
and this post resonates with you then get in touch. You know what's at
stake and the time to act is now.